Does anyone know of any way to monitor computer services?
Before I dive into trying program in a language I’m unfamiliar with I was wonder whether anyone knew of smart app that essentially pinged a http service such as Plex.
It would be really nice to include this feature in my set up rather than using a separate system to monitor services.
I’m comfortable with using the IDE and programming (I’m a developer) but I lack knowledge of this system to dive in.

@Kristopher Kubicki put this together a while back and I’ve used this code to verify IP connectivity to my roomba devicetype. This should help. Sadly right now there is no way to do an actual ICMP ping from the hub. Another way that may work is to put your XBMC machine on a SmartPower Outlet and use the power consumption to tell if its on or off.

At least right now, the SmartThings hub seems to have a lot of scheduler/poll type problems, meaning expecting it to be a reliable monitor for an external device is probably expecting too much.

I’d recommend using something that does monitoring for it’s main function, and integrating it into the SmartThings hub if that’s where you want to see the data (or have it trigger things within the SmartThings environment).

I use NAGIOS. It’s free, open source, and easy to drop on cheap hardware. I set one up at home on a Raspberry Pi 2, then moved it to my office (work) because it really does it’s job well, and is very very flexible.